


The Dawn

by utsu



Series: Between the Trees [2]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Brother-Sister Relationships, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-23
Updated: 2017-07-22
Packaged: 2018-12-05 16:16:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11581647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/utsu/pseuds/utsu
Summary: Himawari truly is her father's daughter.





	1. Chapter 1

“It’s her,” a masked figure hisses, digging his heels into the dirt to slow his pace, his sister nearly crashing into his side. He doesn’t turn to watch her pull her mask over her face to rest on her brow, or the way her eyes widen and gleam in novel interest. He can’t quite manage to tear his own eyes away, can barely even blink for fear that he might miss a second. “The Dawn.”

He crouches low behind a mass of shrubbery, not touching a single branch but looking through the widest gap he can find. He pushes his mask up to his brow and his eyes widen at the shinobi before him, his heart racing.

She moves like liquid thunder, all lithe power and speed.

Her hands glow lilac and she barely blinks, eyes intent upon her attacker, deft hands slicing one minute and arcing in powerful strikes the next. Every attack is calculated, every movement pointed and measured, no energy wasted. He’s only ever seen this level of control once before in his life, when he’d stumbled across the Hyuuga princess.

“She is her mother’s daughter,” his sister whispers, echoing his thoughts, and he can only nod. It’s true enough, he thinks, as Uzumaki Himawari suddenly somersaults into the air, legs trailing in a beautiful arc, before shifting effortlessly until her heel comes crashing down against the shoulder of her opponent. He groans even as he reaches out, fingers wrapping around her ankle and twisting to drag her down into the ground. She wears the crash into the ground easily and disappears in a blur of smoke and a midnight flash, her long hair trailing.

The man leaps away from the crater her body had left behind, somersaulting to the opposite tree line. The man straightens and the sun catches a particular gleam in his eyes that makes instant recognition curl through him, enough so much that he breathes, “ _Storm_.”

“The son,” his sister hisses, and he can sense the way she wants to retreat, ankles already turning, body language shifting defensively. “ _Her brother_.”

It’s a wonder that they hadn’t been discovered at all, regardless of how long they’ve had their chakra cloaked. With two of the most powerful and renowned shinobi in all of the villages only a couple hundred feet away, it almost feels like a mercy that neither of them had paused in their sparring to apprehend them. He can’t help but to frown, eyebrows pursing low as Himawari lifts a hand to wipe at a single bead of blood that drips from her eyebrow and over her scarred cheeks, where Boruto’s kunai had just sliced her open. He watches her smile, and the blood dip over her lips.

She becomes a blur, then, a flash of rose armor and midnight hair, her pink ninsandals tracking incredible steps until she’s right on top of Boruto, one hand slicing towards his left kidney. He dodges effortlessly, leaping out of her reach, but she’s quicker than he is and more precise.

She twirls away from a lethal array of offensive hand-to-hand strikes that Boruto doesn’t hold back; their every move seems intent to kill, so much so that the hair stands up on the nape of his neck, and fear travels icily down his spine. He watches Himawari fake a punch and drop low, swiping her leg at Boruto’s feet only to come spinning back up with lavender energy swirling around her, so close and with enough generated energy so as to pull Boruto into her reach.

He can’t do anything to evade, and so allows his pulled momentum to guide him and a chakra-filled fist to slide through the aura and straight for Himawari’s chest. There’s no way for her to dodge, Boruto is coming in too quick and he’s so close and the man feels his heart leap in his chest, fingers of fear wrapping around his throat, clamping off his air supply.

But Uzumaki Himawari is not known as the most formidable shinobi of this generation for nothing.

He has to enhance his eyes with chakra to follow their movements, everything far too fast for unaided eyes to track. Boruto’s knuckles tear the skin of Himawari’s chest, burning through the rose of her armor, but before they can do much else her hand rises and knocks his wrist away, and her non-dominant hand pushes up without hesitation to smash through his jaw, hard enough to lift him into the air.

He and his sister watch consciousness leave Boruto all at once, even before his body hits the ground. Himawari moves lightning quick, however, and cradles him in her arms before he ever has a chance to hit the ground. She doesn’t even hesitate before heading over to the closest shadow, flickering with the movement of the canopies in the wind. She sets her brother down gently, fingertips already glowing green, moving over his temples. He blinks his eyes open a moment later and smiles, one corner of his mouth tilting higher than the other.

He watches his mouth move, but they’re too far for him and his sister to hear them. They speak too lowly, their conversation hidden away in the golden morning. He blinks for the first time in a long time, his eyes dry. His sister reaches out and grasps his sleeve, tugs gently and says, “We should go, Mairon. Let’s go.”

And he nods, because he’s only just realized he’s trembling—the last time he was this frightened he’d sensed a tumultuous presence miles off of Mist, one that made his hair stand up on end, like static electricity, like lightning.

Uchiha Sasuke.

He inhales and prepares himself to stand, but before his muscles can even constrict to preface the movement, Uzumaki Himawari turns over her shoulder and stares directly at them. There’s nothing about her expression that’s foreboding; her eyes are wide and curious, her mouth pursed, head tilted in wary interest. Even still, Mairon and his sister both are struck motionless, as if the shadows under Himawari’s eyes had hands that could reach them, and hold them prisoner.

Himawari reaches out and touches Boruto’s shoulder, pushing him back down to the grass from where he’d been trying to sit up. He stays where she puts him, on the ground with one arm curled under his head, and he turns to them with a frown. His, Mairon thinks, is a far more distrustful expression.

Himawari rises gracefully, dusting her hands off on her pant legs. She ignores completely the trail of blood down her face, and the burnt skin over her heart where her brother’s knuckles had very nearly broken through the cage of her ribs. She heads towards them with a steady pace, and everything in him tells him to move, to get up, to _run_.

Her presence is a dawning storm, heavy and palpable and all-encompassing the closer she gets, and it presses down on him and his sister both, until movement is a shadow of a thought flickering past them. He trembles, and he blinks, and Uzumaki Himawari stops only a few feet away from them.

She tilts her head, and one of the two waist-long tails of hair held at her neck slides over her shoulder. The rest of her hair falls freely at her shoulders, bangs shifting under the call of the breeze, and her piercing blue eyes flicker between the two of them.

“Hello,” she greets cautiously, one hand coming to rest on the generous curve of her hip.

He can’t find enough air in his lungs to answer, and when he glances over to his sister he sees only fear spilled over her expression, pale and sallow. He swallows twice before he manages to find his voice at all, and even then he can only manage a single word.

“Please,” he says, and Himawari’s open expression falls, her lips frowning.

“What’s your name?” She asks, ignoring his plea. She watches the way his throat bobs, a heavy swallow, and her frown grows deeper. She says, “You don’t have to be afraid, I’m not going to hurt you.”

_You would_ , he thinks frantically, _if you knew our names._

He holds her striking gaze, pools of sunlight glistening on an ocean’s edges, and he remembers the faces of the innocent people he has killed. A shinobi without honor is nothing but an assassin, and he and his sister have been without honor for more than a decade. Growing up in Mist with nothing and no one but each other to look out for is still no excuse for the terrible things that they have done, but it’s one of many reasons that they have.

One of the many reasons that they still do.

Himawari studies them for a moment longer, and the wind plays lovingly with the loose articles of her gear, and the tails of her hair. She crouches slowly onto her haunches, in a way that makes Mairon think she’s being deliberately careful so as to not startle them. She rests her forearms on her thighs, blinking delicately.

“I know who you are,” she says, and Mairon’s spine straightens at just the same time that his sister manages a single step backwards, nearly stumbling. Himawari watches them idly, wide-eyed and inquisitive. “You’ve done some awful things, for an awful long time. I’m still not going to hurt you.”

“Liar,” Mya hisses, and Mairon finds movement in his limbs again, rises quickly to his feet and grabs on to Mya’s sleeve. It’s not a restricting gesture—Mya is too smart to go one-on-one against Uzumaki Himawari and expect to come out of it with anything other than a gravestone. They’ve heard the stories; they’ve seen her in action.

Himawari frowns, eyes flickering to Mairon’s sister. She purses her lips and Mya chews nervously on her own.

“I’m not lying,” she says, and then she smiles. It’s nothing so frightening as the tales have told, not barbed and wild and cutting like they had expected. It’s almost gentle, in the way the edges tilt ever so slightly at the corners. The way it brightens her cheeks into something of a sunrise spill, flushed and warm. She lifts a hand to rub idly at her nose, smearing the blood on her cheek, and doesn’t even mind it.

“I promise I won’t hurt you, Mya.” Mairon sees his sister flinch from the corner of his eyes, but he doesn’t tear them from Himawari. _Is this a trap?_ He thinks, and studies the sincerity of her receptive expression with critical eyes. Is she just this efficient a liar, that her kindness almost bleeds true?

What kind of shinobi would ever give him and his sister a free pass, unless the entire act was a ruse?

But Himawari doesn’t approach them, doesn’t even seem bothered to be so close to them without them being restrained—by her hand or any other’s. Instead, she watches them openly, her expressions appearing clearly over her face, every movement measured but in a way that is cautious, preventative of startling her prey.

“I’d like to talk,” she goes on easily, and then she gestures over her shoulder with one thumb. Mairon’s eyes leap for a quick second to her brother, still lazing in the tall grass, appearing to be completely unaware of this exchange at all. Mairon knows better, can feel the slow roil of Boruto’s chakra under the surface of his relaxed façade. Any move they might make against his sister and he’ll be in their faces instantly, fists glowing molten red. “My brother’s staying over there. We can talk. Is that okay?”

“Then talk,” Mairon bites off, unable to relax in her presence. He can’t believe that they’d managed to stumble across not only Uzumaki Himawari, who became an S-class shinobi at age sixteen, but her older brother, too. They were exactly the last people on the face of the Earth that Mairon and Mya would ever have wanted to come across—the tales of their heroics spread far and wide, as does the truth of their indomitable powers. According to the stories, running into one of the Uzumaki children is bad enough, too much for Mairon and Mya both to handle on their best day.

According to the stories, running into both of them is a death sentence.

But there were quieter stories, less heard and less said, that spoke of a gentleness unthinkable of someone so powerful as Himawari. A willingness to listen, before acting, should she have the opportunity. The tales that follow Boruto sometimes speak of a patience, too, one that stays his fist and opens his heart.

That the Uzumaki kids were fair in their delivery of justice, and inclined towards peace, regardless of the proof of their destructive efficiency against evil forces.

Mairon can hardly believe it when he finds himself listening to her, doesn’t understand the flicker of heat in his chest as anything but a shadow of a hope he hasn’t felt in years.

“Lives are precious,” she starts, with blood under her fingernails from where she’d sliced into Boruto’s side. Her voice isn’t condescending but gentle, just this side of persuasive. _Imploring_ , he thinks. “We need to protect them. Not destroy them.”

“What’s so great about lives?” He snaps, spittle flying from his lips. He stands to his full height on shaky legs, so that he can look down at her instead of sharing that equal ground. “Life has never done anything but destroy, when it comes to my sister and I.”

“Maybe,” Himawari allows, slowly standing back to her full height. “But isn’t that all the more reason for you to overcome it?”

He hesitates, brows puckering in confusion. “What?”

Himawari’s patience mirrors the mountains, sturdy and loyal to the touch of the sky.

“Wouldn’t the best fight against the cruelty of life,” she says, “be kindness? Instead of adding to the darkness that had ailed you, wouldn’t it make more sense to destroy _it_ instead?”

Mairon rolls his eyes, spits, “Kill them with kindness, you mean? That’s bullshit.”

“Maybe,” Himawari echoes, tilting her head. “But I’m not wrong. With every life you take, you add to the same darkness that robbed you of light. Are you glad for it?”

“I don’t give a shit either way,” he says, “I just need the money. Don’t care about light.”

“You should,” Himawari offers, almost hesitantly. “It’s heavier, sometimes, than the darkness. But it’s more rewarding. It helps with the shadows.”

“And what would someone like you know of the shadows,” he snarls, brave enough if only for a moment to take a single aggressive step towards her. She doesn’t even flinch, barely even registers the movement as anything out of the ordinary. Mairon does see her fingers twitch, however, and when his eyes glance over her shoulder Boruto is sitting up, eyes intent upon them. He realizes that he’d forgotten about her brother for a moment, blinded by rage. Her signal for him to be still brings him back into focus, and Mairon stays very, very still.

“I know a thing or two,” she admits quietly, and he watches the brightness of her eyes dim in spades, like shadows passing over her expression from the inside. “But what I know best is that no amount of money will ever fill the holes of the lives you’ve torn into, the ones left behind in you. It might make you happy, and it might keep you alive. But what kind of life is that? Siphoning off of innocence to fuel your own agenda?”

It’s in this moment that Mairon sees an outline of the Himawari from the tales; it’s in the sudden fire of her eyes, and the way her chin juts up ever so slightly in challenge. It’s in the way she doesn’t blink when she stares him down, and how her energy suddenly spikes, charging the air and making him and Mya both shake.

“I cannot accept it,” she says, and her voice is lower, coming straight from her chest. “I won’t accept that kind of selfishness.”

“What’re you gonna do, kill us?”

“No,” she responds, so easily. “I told you. We’re just talking.”

He can’t make sense of her, not for a moment, not for a mile. Every part of her contradicts, until all he knows for sure is the fear and the uncertainty. He thinks about the blood on his hands, on Mya’s too, and the way that she cries sometimes at night, when she thinks he’s already asleep.

He doesn’t know what his life would look like without killing contracts and blood money. He’s never known.

He looks at Himawari and somehow, it becomes a little clearer, and he resents her for it. It’s unintentional and automatic, the way frustration kicks at his gut. That this girl’s words could get so close to his heart, through every iron wall of control he’s ever instated, with ease.

But the frustration seeps out of him when he looks over at Mya and sees that beloved and fickle gleam of hope in her eyes, and the way she looks up to him for guidance. His little sister, sharp-toothed and maniacal, but tired.

When he glances back at Himawari, her expression isn’t imploring or hopeful, and it’s not critical, either. There’s no judgment there, only a relative of what looks like _concern_.

For them; for two murderers.

It knocks him backwards, a mental and physical retreat in a single step. Himawari watches him carefully, head still tilted, and he can’t help but to ask, “Why do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“ _Listen_ ,” Mya says, very quietly. Her fists tremble at her sides, and she doesn’t remove her gaze from Himawari for a moment. Sunshine starts to pool over the meadow behind Himawari, until the edges of her appear to glow, to shine. Light catches in her shadowed expression, an anomaly, and Mairon watches the way her lips kick up into a delicate smile.

“Because,” she says, with illimitable gentleness. “I care.”

And it’s this, coupled with the low note of despair that Himawari’s words force from Mya’s throat, that brings Mairon’s defenses down. Not entirely, not enough for him to fall to his knees as he so desperately wants to, every inch of him exhausted. His sister trembles beside him and his heart pounds heavily in his chest, his throat tight with emotion. He looks at Himawari and he can see an echo of her mother in the kindness of her eyes, the strength of her steady posture, the gentleness of her receptivity. He hears his sister’s words, the way she’d looked on at Himawari and instantly seen her mother in the effortless grace of her battle ready body, and the cunning of her mind.

He can see that, too, clear as day.

But it’s the Nanadaime he sees in the gleaming brightness of her sharp eyes, and the unconquerable power of her resilience, even in the face of two pillars of certain evil; it is the kindness of her words and intentions that bleeds gold into the darkness of the world, until Mairon is forced to see another way, one he had not been able to see or imagine in more than a decade of darkness.

Her words pierce through the veil of darkness he’s only ever been able to see, like fingers of gold reaching for the heart of him, not to crush but to cradle.

He thinks of all the monsters who have been pulled from the shadows and welcomed so easily into the world of light, all after encountering a single person; one whose words held his heart open and outstretched even to those with seemingly nothing left but darkness to give, and how he and his heart had been enough to temper the masses and free them of their shadows.

_Uzumaki Himawari truly is her father’s daughter._

Mairon has one last question to ask, as Mya steps closer to him, one hand reaching for his shoulder, and hope floods his system, the most potent of drugs. “Why?”

“Life is precious,” Himawari says again, so easily, and she smiles. “And if you’ll let me, I’d love to help you remember that.”

Mairon watches the sun rise behind Himawari, and the way it battles to outshine the levity of her expression, and he thinks the world has placed her with the only appropriate epithet.

_The Dawn_ , he thinks, as he and his sister open their hearts to the gentleness of Himawari’s welcome.

_The dawn of a new light._


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Naruto and Himawari Prompt: I was wondering if you could write about Himawari getting seriously hurt and Naruto can't handle it because he was supposed to protect her?

It’s difficult to remember a time when Himawari had been vulnerable.

Naruto has flashes of her vulnerability stowed deep, in the recesses of his present mind. They flash by in swaddles of baby blankets and crib bars, in onesies and unsteady legs insistent on movement. He sees her blue eyes, so like his own, too big for her face, and the crinkles that appear at the corners when he makes her laugh; the weight of her in his arms, feather-light and celebrated, tucked into the inseams of his elbows, streamline against the iron of his forearms.

There was a time when she belonged there, tucked right up against his heart, sheltered in muscle and bone and warmth. His baby girl.

And a different kind of vulnerability when Himawari crested a mountain upon which adulthood peaked, and someone wasn’t careful with her heart. Himawari is a warm girl, bright and smiling, relentlessly peaceful and proactive. She’s all too similar to Naruto in that regard, actions always preceding words, and Naruto knows best how often that can lead to pain. She had not hidden her pain from him, but rather shattered against his chest, tears crystalline; raindrops against pain-stained glass.

The weight of her in his arms; the wet touch of tears against his chest.

Naruto does not scream, he does not move. He trembles, not from the weight of his daughter, hanging unresponsively in his arms, or the exertion of fighting an army to get to her. No, something insidious hisses from the gaping maw of his own weaknesses, not from exertion.

Rage courses steadily but so slowly, a thawing of feeling, sensation evaporating in increments through his bloodstream. Himawari’s blood stains his clothes and his eyes sharpen into pinpricks, his heart a war drum booming, booming, counting down the seconds before.

Claws pierce through the skin of his fingertips and curl around Himawari’s arm, pinpricks almost touching skin. Battalions close in on him from all sides, weapons flying, seals forming too quickly for the human eye to catch. Naruto feels heat at his back and doesn’t know if it’s a fire jutsu or the rage, peeling at the skin of his back, the wings of his shoulders caved in around the fading light of his daughter.

Naruto leans down and presses his lips to her forehead, the faintest of touches. Time seems to slow as he kneels, settles her unmoving body against the grass at his feet. Something pierces his side, jerking his body but not his attention, and he reaches out to run his thumb along Himawari’s sallow cheek. It comes back with dirt and blood and blood and blood.

Naruto feels the threads of his skin begin to unwind and a roar builds from the pit of his gut to the caverns of his lungs; his bones shift and shatter. The mangled graveyard of his vocal chords vibrates preemptively around a breath, and Naruto raises the necrotic cells back to life with a scream that tears veins from the earth around his feet.

Himawari hasn’t needed his protection for years, had advanced through the ranks quicker than anyone her age, and many above her. She’s as lethal as she is careful, except when she isn’t, and Naruto had failed her. He had failed her.

“My little girl,” he snarls, and the frontlines stutter and stumble, hesitation without control in the face of a monster so willfully unwinding.

He pulls the kunai from his side and crushes it to dust, to dust, to dust in the palm of his hand—the first time he held Himawari, so small and beautiful, two weeks sooner than she should’ve been born, she had fit in the palm of his—

Naruto’s pinprick eyes flash open and he teaches his enemies what it is to become a reckoning.

And it’s the earth and all her creatures that learn to tremble.


End file.
